Entrepreneurship

Weaving between an ensemble of printers and T-shirt presses kept in the back of a tattoo parlor, Calvin Payne fills custom orders from all over the country.

“These shirts are going to Tupelo, Mississippi. And those other shirts are going to Millington, Tennessee,” Payne said, pointing to packages sitting on the counter. “I do a lot of breast cancer awareness shirts… and these are my favorite, because I know that they go for a good cause.”

Payne started his printing business while working as a server at Sweetie Pie’s restaurant in the Grove neighborhood, buying equipment with his savings and learning how to use it with tutorials on YouTube. This month, the 44-year-old entrepreneur is moving CQ Custom Designs into his own storefront for the first time.

If you’ve heard St. Louis referred to as hub for entrepreneurship and want to find out more for yourself, this is a good week to do it.

St. Louis is hosting two major events for Global Entrepreneurship Week. On Tuesday, Nov. 15, the STL Export Accelerator will take place at Saint Louis University’s John Cook School of Business from 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.

Updated May 19 with winning team — The La Sierra University Enactus team was chosen as the 2016 National Champion.

Two thousand college students from all across the country are in St. Louis through Tuesday for a socially-minded business competition called the Enactus National Expo.

The Enactus university teams are the winners of their regional expos and are competing for the title of national champion by presenting their projects to corporate executives who evaluate the impact of their work.

Sparo Labs is a good poster child for where entrepreneurial spirit can take you in St. Louis. Co-founders Andrew Brimer and Abby Cohen went to Washington University together—Brimer is a St. Louis native, and Cohen moved from Michigan—and generated the idea for their product, the Wing, in their last year of college.

A high-profile entrepreneur is calling on the community to do more to support St. Louis-area startups.

"We just need to tell that story. That’s not to say that Silicon Valley won’t continue to be great and New York City isn’t great and Boston isn’t great, but St. Louis is great too," said A-O-L Co-Founder Steve Case during a stop on Friday at Washington University.

"There should be some degree of skepticism when people are talking about new ideas, but give entrepreneurs the benefit of the doubt."

Paul Sorenson was working his way toward a master’s degree from Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work when he kept bumping into the same questions over and over again.

As an intern for the nonprofit health-care provider Grace Hill, Sorenson was supposed to connect poor families with resources that could help get them caught up on rent and utility bills. But what if one of these agencies had its funding reduced, moved its offices or was no longer open?

This is how the conversation usually goes when Dejah Cox tells her friends she has a job.

“They’re like, ‘oh really, what do you do?’” they’ll ask her.

Dejah: “I’m a beekeeper.”

“They’re like, ‘no!’” Dejah said with a chuckle. “They’re shocked.”

On a recent Saturday morning, the teenager donned full beekeeper regalia and flipped open the top of a hive in a vacant lot in north St. Louis. The honey she harvests will be used for an array of products, from lotions to body butter under the label Honey Masters.

All but a handful of the 20 Arch Grants winners will be making a move, some farther than others.

While six companies already are based in St. Louis, two of the startups are coming from London, England, and another from Cali, Colombia. The rest will relocate from Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago and Columbia, Mo.

The global startup competition gives each winning business $50,000 and free support services, in exchange for moving to St. Louis for at least a year. The clock will begin ticking July 1.

It’s Tuesday, that magical day of the week when our thoughts turn to questions of economics, business, innovation, technology … and related topics that tickle our fancy but we haven’t been able to report on ourselves. It’s the day we say, “Don’t think we haven’t been paying attention, dear reader,” and we share some the things we’ve been reading on topics of interest.

On Friday, Arch Grants announced the finalists for its 2014 Arch Grants Business Plan Competition. The field has been whittled down to 46 entrepreneurs. Twenty of those finalists will win $50,000 each along with business support services to help them launch amazing businesses. In exchange for winning, they have to locate, or relocate, to St. Louis for at least a year.

A report released today is touting the emergence of St. Louis as tech startup hot-spot.

ITEN, a non-profit that provides programs, events and access to resources for area startups produced the report. It collected data from more than 350 area startups and evaluated the health of the industry by looking at a variety of measures, including the amount of funds raised, current monthly revenue and the number of employees.

There’s a new news aggregator in town: RealtimeSTL.com, brought to you by the former regional editor of Patch STL, Kurt Greenbaum. The website curates news about St. Louis based on what is trending on social media.

“We’re bringing together sources of information from all over the St. Louis area. And we’re trying to organize this in a way so that readers can really find out what people are talking about in St. Louis,” Greenbaum said.

"When smaller cities play to their strengths while simultaneously working to shore up their deficiencies, they can attract talented entrepreneurs and help them succeed." That's what Chuck Cohn, native St. Louisan and CEO of Varsity Tours says in an article on Forbes.com. Cohn says St. Louis can serve as a model for other cities like it to develop tech hubs.

Entrepreneurs are defined as risk-takers. They are people who take a business idea and run with it, hoping their endeavor is commercial viable and one which can be sustained.

Earlier this month, business leaders and St. Louis City and County officials announced a new effort to support entrepreneurs and startup companies in the St. Louis region. The goal is to raise $100 million over the next five years.

Earlier this month, business leaders and St. Louis City and County officials announced a new effort to support entrepreneurs and startup companies in the St. Louis region. The goal is to raise $100 million over the next five years.

The site Under30CEO has included St. Louis on its 2013 list for Best Cities for Young Entrepreneurs. St. Louis sits at number 5 in the "Medium Cities" category (for cities with populations between 250,000 and 500,000). Two other Missouri cities made the list: Kansas City at number 4 in the same category as St. Louis - along with college town Columbia, Mo. at number 2 in the small cities category.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: When it comes to faculty researchers bringing technology from the workbench to the market, Kevin Whittington says it’s all about making a difference, not about making a buck.

Ten grants are up for grabs for new businesses that set up shop in St. Louis. A local non-profit, Arch Grants, says it will award the $50,000 grants this May in an effort to bring innovative businesses to the city.

Arch Grants Co-founder Joe Schlafly said the for-profit start-ups that are selected will be required to stay for at least one year.

“St. Louis is not a dog-meat, down place," Schlafly said. "It is a place where things are happening. We’re open for business. We want to be on the short list, not just [on] no list.”